Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Safari for Windows.. why?

A lot of people seem to be pondering why Apple would port Safari to Windows. Safari is a minor player, so why bother? I can think of only one answer: iPhone and offline browser-apps

The iPhone has a Safari derived browser build it. Apple didn't talk about it, but if the browser is the development platform, then there must be something like Google Gears coming. If they want to get a large number of people building apps for the iPhone, they need to support development on Windows. The first step for that is Safari on Windows.

2 Comments:

That was my first thought too. The problem is, we're thinking like engineers. Apple makes consumer plays, not developer plays. If this were a developer play, they would simply tell developers to buy MacBookPros and use the tools there. So it's not about iPhone development but something else.

My second thought was that this is about getting WebKit (or perhaps CoreGraphics) on Windows. But if that's all this is, there's no reason to release Safari -- just release WebKit (or CoreGraphics).

After pondering this at great length, I've concluded that it's mostly like one of two things: Either it's a Trojan horse and we lack enough information to make an educated guess what's in the horse, or else this is about Google.

Specifically, Google is the default search engine in Safari, and every time a user executes a search in its address bar, Apple gets a small bit of revenue from Google (or so I've heard). If true, at even single digit browser market share that would be financially worth the relatively minimal cost of deploying it on Windows.

Perhaps also Apple's about to get into Google Gears in a big way and Safari is somehow a necessary ingredient for whatever products they have planned. However, since Google's funding Firefox development, I don't see what Safari could deliver that Firefox doesn't. (except webkit, which just returns me to the previous thought)

The only thing I'm certain about is that we're all overanalyzing this. :-) If this had been MSFT or GOOG, we'd all be laughing at the stupidity of it. Instead, we're all trying to figure out what trick AAPL has up their sleeves...